ANALYSIS OF STAGE-SEQUENTIAL CHANGE IN REHABILITATION RESEARCH

The analysis of change is a critical topic for rehabilitation outcomes research, because the goal of rehabilitation is to improve patients' function. This article will sketch the issues and problems in statisti cal methods for analysis of change. Recovery after serious illness or injury often has been described in terms of transitions between a seri es of stages, but these theories of recovery have rarely been subjecte d to adequate statistical examination. This article presents two metho ds for the analysis of change, suitable for ordinal measures of functi on and for testing either simple cumulative or complex multipath stage -models of recovery. Progress in medical rehabilitation will be enhanc ed by explicitly specifying models of recovery, measuring recovery at multiple time points, and using the resulting data to test these model s empirically.